Todd Rogers first, and Billy Mitchell then.....one never did the claimed score, the other cheated in a ridiculous way.....looks like we'd regret PAC...at least, he used to cheat in a more talented way....
What do you guys, with much deeper knowledge in the arcades than me, think about the matter, and on TG ...?!?

Todd Rogers first, and Billy Mitchell then.....one never did the claimed score, the other cheated in a ridiculous way.....looks like we'd regret PAC...at least, he used to cheat in a more talented way....
What do you guys, with much deeper knowledge in the arcades than me, think about the matter, and on TG ...?!?

DEFCON=3
Just my personal opinion.
"most of top players are not interested in local fake database."

I've read a lot about these, actually just from private messages/chats with people interested about the facts... tbh, I'm not really sure I fully understood everything in detail, and a true topic put under discussion here is about TG's way of authentication of scores, which I personally poorly know - so I can't really express myself there.

One sure thing I'd like to disagree with, there's no god falling because the players involved were not gods in the first place. Nobody would deserve that title, there's monstrous capabilities in certain players but everyone's a human and, while we hope there's always fairness where there's potential, we can't be too much surprised if we discover tricks. It's in human nature, it can come from everyone.

I appreciate all these efforts made to figure out the truth, they are always welcome. I'm not exempted from being cynic and think how many similar cases could pop up in future :/

It's of note that the disputes of the scores of both Todd Rogers and Billy Mitchell were started by MARP members (Dick Moreland and xelnia).

I 100% support the current efforts of xelnia and other MARP/Donkey Kong Forum members involved in the still open Billy Mitchell dispute. With regard to Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong scores,in Billy's videos the way new screens are drawn matches how MAME draws and not how arcade draws. It's important to get the truth and build scoreboards with integrity.

Another elite player, Wes Copeland, has accused Mitchell’s Donkey Kong score as being bogus, citing what he categorized as a suspiciously fortuitous point gain from a part of the game governed by random number generation, or RNG.

“Most of Billy’s points in his direct feed games comes from blue barrel smashes. These are completely RNG-based, yet somehow his averages are way above the mean,”

According to normal distribution the odds for single player to get 380 smashes (as Billy did) is roughly 1/12. So there's nothing unusual with Billy's amount of smashes which seems to be in question here. The odds for at least one of the 12 players listed to have 380+ is roughly 64%

If we assume that Billy cheated and thus don't include his smashes to prevent skewing of average & SD... then the odds for a player to get 380 smashes is 1/18. With 12 players that means the odds for at least one player to get 380 is 49%.

Conclusion: there's is nothing abnormal with Billy's blue barrel smashing. Heck, Wes himself gets only 6000 points less for BB smashing than Billy. Of course this doesn't mean that Billy played fair, but at least these statistics don't support the claim that he was cheating.

There's a bit more to the barrel analysis than that. What's suspicious is that compared to other players with very high barrel points, Billy has far fewer smashes on the barrel boards (where the player has a fairly high degree of control of the barrels and smashes), but he more than makes up for it on the conveyor and rivet boards which are much more luck based. The theory is that Billy didn't know how to group and control the barrels very well on the barrel boards (which is where most top players get a lot of points), so instead he had to make up for it on the much more luck based conveyor and rivet boards. Extremely favorable luck is frequently found in TAS assisted replays where players can retry levels until they get favorable luck. Some people also did analysis of the number of 300/500/800 smashes he got in one of his WR games, and again, it was a very lucky distribution.

Of course, this isn't definitive proof, and it's usual that PR games are going to be luckier than average. But Billy's game isn't just "luckier than average". On the luck based rivet and conveyor belts its much luckier than the other WR games, which presumably were luckier than average themselves.

However the barrel analysis is just circumstantial evidence, but it supports the theory that Billy made a tool assisted MAME replay, then played it back to make a video tape instead of actually playing live on an arcade game. That said, the strongest evidence of MAME use is the video frame analysis of partially drawn frames as new screens are being drawn from videos of his play. Emulation "defects" in MAME at the time resulted in significant differences in how those partial frames are drawn between Arcade and MAME. The partial frames in Billy's videos are how MAME draws those partial frames, not how arcade does.

Probably yes, but this was all the info I had. Mr Copeland thought that his stats were proof which they are not... I haven't seen any other proof so far.

What's suspicious is that compared to other players with very high barrel points, Billy has far fewer smashes on the barrel boards (where the player has a fairly high degree of control of the barrels and smashes), but he more than makes up for it on the conveyor and rivet boards which are much more luck based. The theory is that Billy didn't know how to group and control the barrels very well on the barrel boards (which is where most top players get a lot of points), so instead he had to make up for it on the much more luck based conveyor and rivet boards.

Or in other words the theory is that Billy didn't know tactics well enough to get very lucky on barrel boards despite trying same board over and over again... ummm...

Some people also did analysis of the number of 300/500/800 smashes he got in one of his WR games, and again, it was a very lucky distribution.

Well their analysis is incorrect, at least when comparing to other top scores. Copeland lists average points for smash and there's nothing special with Billy's average, again comparing with other players' averages on the list.

Of course, this isn't definitive proof, and it's usual that PR games are going to be luckier than average. But Billy's game isn't just "luckier than average". On the luck based rivet and conveyor belts its much luckier than the other WR games, which presumably were luckier than average themselves.

Hard to trust this claim since the stats I've seen so far refute these type of claims... maybe it'd be same with this claim as well if I had stats for it.

That said, the strongest evidence of MAME use is the video frame analysis of partially drawn frames as new screens are being drawn from videos of his play.